A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Smith Rakoff (Scribner; $26)

This début novel updates Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” a satirical portrait of nineteen-thirties Vassar graduates, for the late-nineties boom years in Manhattan, where six Oberlin graduates struggle to make it as writers, actors, musicians, and academics. The novel ably captures the zeitgeist, with venture capitalists financing magazines headed by M.I.T. prodigies and young people worrying about the gentrification of their Brooklyn neighborhoods. But where McCarthy’s histrionic rich girls enabled her to skewer contemporary mores, Smith Rakoff’s are almost indistinguishable in their blandness. All “dewy flowers of the upper middle class,” they want to rebel against their “brash bourgeois” upbringings intellectually, but without sacrificing material comforts. An understandable dilemma, yet it fails to generate much narrative tension. ♦

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